A minor aside- you mentioned svchost
That as the name implies hosts services (usually multiple ones at the same time) and killing them tends to have detrimental effects on a PC.
Still drop down to a command line and type tasklist /svc and assuming you are on a good version of XP (that is to say not XP home although there is an alternative for those) it will spring up with a process ID (which will be unique unlike the same) and services said svchost is running.
Usually though when speeding up a PC I do three things
1) Combofix or if going manual gmer. Malware and other nice hooks can be found and dropped for a nice speed boost.
2) Autostart entries and explorer addons- "msconfig" has a passable selection thing here. Stuff like hijack free http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/download/ does it better though.
3) The usual defrag, remove drive compression, remove drive indexing and choice explorer tweaks (animated windows and what have you, lose the 20 meg picture of their pet/kids and replace with 400K equivalent).
By and large installed programs just sit there although some of those might have services associated with them. As pocchama1996 said at the start- most of those are frameworks and runtime libraries so unless you only run a give few programs that can live without them you might as well leave it as more and more programs need them.
Do note messing with things you know nothing of is a quick way to mess up a machine.
That as the name implies hosts services (usually multiple ones at the same time) and killing them tends to have detrimental effects on a PC.
Still drop down to a command line and type tasklist /svc and assuming you are on a good version of XP (that is to say not XP home although there is an alternative for those) it will spring up with a process ID (which will be unique unlike the same) and services said svchost is running.
Usually though when speeding up a PC I do three things
1) Combofix or if going manual gmer. Malware and other nice hooks can be found and dropped for a nice speed boost.
2) Autostart entries and explorer addons- "msconfig" has a passable selection thing here. Stuff like hijack free http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/download/ does it better though.
3) The usual defrag, remove drive compression, remove drive indexing and choice explorer tweaks (animated windows and what have you, lose the 20 meg picture of their pet/kids and replace with 400K equivalent).
By and large installed programs just sit there although some of those might have services associated with them. As pocchama1996 said at the start- most of those are frameworks and runtime libraries so unless you only run a give few programs that can live without them you might as well leave it as more and more programs need them.
Do note messing with things you know nothing of is a quick way to mess up a machine.
